Developed a content strategy for reporting business changes

Sage Ltd is a global market leader in accounting and payroll software.  My role was to design proof of concept and improve content approach to designging a proof of concept prototype.

Sage company logo

Scope of work and problem

Sage Ltd is a global market leader in accounting and payroll software.  

The scope of this project was delivering a proof of concept prototype for a new digital service to support business continuity for reporting a bereavement in all their products.

  • The scope had changed to report all change of circumstances not just bereavement.

  • There was no content strategy to accommodate new users.

  • Current journey is telephony so introducing an online self serve journey is a huge change in user behaviour.

Things I thought about

  • How to meet customer needs as the current telephony route is a huge change of process for existing customers.

  • Customers are in vulnerable situations and how best to support them in an online self serve journey.

  • Consistency is essential in both offline and online journeys.

  • All touchpoints to have the same voice and tone throughout the full journey.

Things I did

  • Designed a content strategy for this service which had never been done before.

  • Designed a bespoke style guide which had never been done before and included clear examples of appropriate language to use in offline and online touchpoints in the journey.

  • Conducted further user research to identify and support new users through an empathy mapping workshop.

  • Conducted research including public sector, charities, private sector, academic research to create a content strategy and shared findings with design team to discuss the benefits of using a new style guide.

  • Led design workshops to name the service and created some design activities to ideate design concepts using language activities.

Results and impact

Conducting user research meant that:

  • I was able to identify new users

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  • I built relationship with the right people and stakeholders.

  • Improved current communications plan which content strategy fed into.

  • New style guide appropriate for users in the prototype.

  • Redesigned end to end journeys to meet user needs.

  • Gained stakeholder buy-in for the project to proceed to the next stage of delivery which results in iterating and testing prototype.

  • Advocated for content and raisedawareness of the value of content design with internal and external stakeholders.

  • I embeded some best practices of content design within a team that now understood the value of content.